Leap While You Look: Moving forward in the Recession

He wasn’t talking about nationalizing the nation’s banking system or about reviving the economy in the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. But when psychologist Karl Weick spoke to me six years ago in a 2003 HBR interview, Sense and Reliability, he presciently described what the world is going through now, and he offered some advice on how to avoid becoming paralyzed by what he called a “cosmology episode.”

A cosmology episode is the opposite of a déjà vu experience. When you experience déjà vu, everything suddenly feels inexplicably familiar. By contrast, in a cosmology episode, everything seems completely strange and dangerous, unknown. In cosmology events, people feel that they don’t know what to do because they’ve never been here before. Panic and fear bubble to the surface, and folks become so anxious that they find it almost impossible to take action.

Weick’s insight about how to move forward during a cosmology episode is as counter-intuitive as it is compelling. The people who really get in trouble, he says, are those who rationalize everything before taking any action. Instead, leaders need to act before they have defined and refined all their hypotheses. “Action, tempered by reflection, is the critical component in recovering from cosmology episodes,” he told HBR readers. “Once you start to act, you can flesh out your interpretations and rework them. But it’s the action itself that gets you moving again. That’s why I advise leaders to leap in order to look, or leap while looking.”

A psychology professor at the University of Michigan Business School at Ann Arbor, Weick offered a practical example of his theory. Some Hungarian troops who got lost in the Alps wandered around aimlessly until one of the soldiers found a map in his pocket. The platoon found their way to safety, only to learn that the map they used was, in fact, a map of the Pyrenees. “I just love that story,” Weick laughed, “because it illustrates that when you’re confused, almost any old strategic plan can help you discover what’s going on and what should be done next. In crises especially, leaders have to act in order to think – and not the other way around.”

Weick offered another observation that can give us hope in these unpredictable times. There’s one kind of leader who is particularly good at managing cosmology episodes, he says, and that’s the newcomer. He picks up on a lot of opportunities that old-timers miss. The problem is that the new kid on the block is often afraid of speaking up lest he sound stupid. But If Obama’s first week in office is anything to judge by, this is not a man who stays up late at night worrying that he might sound dumb for trying to handle a financial meltdown, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, crises in the health care system, the education system, and so on.

And that should give business people a lot of reason to “galumph” – Weick’s word for a kind of improvisation whereby organizations try out different possibilities. When you stop and think about it, what else can we really do?

Diane Coutu is the director of client communications at Banyan Family Business Advisors, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the author of the HBR article “How Resilience Works.”